Marketing in Accessibility

BRYAN STROMER: Hi, thanks so much, Thomas, and team for putting this together, thank you for everyone who is here in person and also tuning in. This is a topic that I find really fun and one that I think isn't really talked a lot about in the accessibility space. A lot of times we're very focused on the product, the code, and all of those great features that are so foundational to making something accessible, but then the question I've always This is what is next, how do we make sure that we're reaching people with disabilities, with the same kind of vigor that we see brands go after, any other set of consumers.

So today I wanted to talk a little bit about how brands interact with disability. I'm going to start with kind of my own personal story, how I got involved in this space, and I'm going through some examples and also give some tips around accessibility, and then toward the end, we'll have time for Q&A and also just conversation. I find that these presentations are a lot more fun when people actually are engaged, and I get to learn from you too, I think that is the piece I'm looking most forward t to.

I have a quick agenda here. I talked, kind of ran through this, but I'll talk about my story. We'll go through the case study. Also just an interesting piece kind of around, and I think this is a good conversation starter, what does the future of accessibility look like, what are some trends, and then how can you become an advocate for accessibility especially I think it's interesting when people are more focus abdomen the tech side and work at brands or companies that have a big marketing arm, communications arm, how can you kind of infiltrate that space too.

I have on here a few images, I'll describe them, if you look to the left, there's actually an image that was a tweet that I was tagged in earlier this fall, it was an interesting one for me, because somehow this person found, I think, probably the first instance of my advocacy work and how I got interested in accessibility, what the tweet says is: Famous students who had IAPs in New York City schools, and I'm tagged, a bunch of other people, and it says it hasn't been long since schools were forced to accept students with disabilities.

The disability community should contribute to this conversation. And I thought this tweet was really interesting, because it links back to this article that I was kind of the poster child of in 2013, which is the year that I graduated, from High School, where right below, I always remember in the daily news, right below Kim Kardashian, you knew it was big news for the day, there was a headliner, Chancellor Walcott, the school's Chancellor at the time, orders top High Schools to admit students with disabilities or special needs.

It was really personal to me, because I had gone through the experience of applying to a specialized High School in New York City, getting in based off of my test score, and then being told, well, we don't have any students like you, and how are you going to do things like the stairs. And being born with cerebral palsy, it's always interesting that it's a disability that people can see when I walk into the room, but I also am able -- you know, I'm able to do pretty much what I want to do on a regular basis.

I always say if we're going to climbing a mountain, that may not be for me, but for my day to day, I'm pretty good. And I think this really just stuck out, because this is 2013, this is not long ago we were sill segregating schooling, it's important to think about this when you're thinking about marketing, because when you're approaching people, this is the mentality people have grown up around with disability, they haven't people with disabilities in their schools and their classrooms when they were growing up or in their workplaces, so when they think about disability, they're still kind of tapping into this very dated model that we know about where we see people with disabilities being represented as unemployed, as not capable to contributing to society, as not having value, as not being able to do things, like be in romantic relationships or have children.

So it was just a good reminder, and I kind of wanted to just start with that. My advocacy journey I think really, though, began when I went to school. I went to Vanderbilt. I got a scholarship to an organization, we recruits New York City students, and sends them to schools like Vanderbilt.

When I was Vanderbilt, I saw that same thing I talked about on the previous slide where Vanderbilt had essentially their Office of Student with disabilities was actually located off of campus, it was located in a building that was essentially the dining warehouse, and then the student -- the office for people with disabilities, so that was a fifteen-minute walk for me, which I was like, that's really interesting that you have a large population of people with mobility disabilities, and they're being forced to walk these distances.

And when I kind of raised this, I was told, well, oh, a lot of students don't want to be seen entering this space and kind of labeled as disabled or having a disability, so, again, we see the stigma actually having real-world ramifications on people, on people's lives. For me, and this is where I kind of started to find my voice and actually understand the importance of changing representation, I was like, that doesn't make any sense to me.

So I got the feeling Vanderbilt was trying to wait me out, the nice thing about Universities is their student population refreshes every four years, if there's an issue they don't want to deal with, they wait for those students to graduate. So on my graduation date, I ended up writing a piece for "The Washington Post," and there's a tweet that I took a screen shot of, and it's to the left, and it says I go to a top University.

Known for its research in disabilities, yet students like me are an afterthought. And I love this tweet, this just came out below it in September, but it says Vanderbilt student access office provides a wide range of services to students with disabilities, has upgraded its facilities, learn about the office which has moved to the state-of-the-art space in the heart of campus. So I think kind of this idea of kind of constantly running into people's assumptions about me as a person with a disability, and then seeing the ramifications, and then wanting to change that is really how I got interested in marketing and it explains a lot of how I approach and kind of my philosophy on accessibility.

This is like the last slide with me, I promise, but basically my career after that has been getting to work on understanding for Microsoft how really my 5 to 9 p.m. job at Microsoft was starting in disability or marketing group, which was, you know, we kind of had all of these other groups that were basically mini-employee resource groups, and what I said is why don't we have one for disability? I mean, Microsoft had just run a Super Bowl ad featuring a person with a disability, so I was really adamant about that.

And got to get secure funding pretty significant budget each year, we grew that group to be the fastest growing kind of group within our marketing team of people signing up to join the -- this community. So up there, I have a picture and it's from an event I did with ad week, where it says it's not enough to just write a story about a person with a disability, we need people with disabilities to write their own stories and not have it written for them, which is something that I really strongly believe and why I want to see more people with disabilities in marketing roles and roles around story telling is this idea that, you know, we so often see other people trying to capture the narrative of disability.

I mean, we know even in film there's a big controversy, because often people with disabilities are characters with disabilities are played by nondisabled actors, and it's really interesting, because at the same time we know that there's historically people with disabilities have struggled to gain meaningful employment, so why when there are these opportunities that are specific to really designed for people with disabilities are we not giving it to them? This is a -- an event I did with PR week down there and I don't love the title, you think it's very dramatic, fighting fears, suppressing stigmas, one of my coworkers there, which is really fun, then in the middle, it's probably my favorite photo, it's the photo of me, and four other people, and we're in front of a sign that says GAAD, so Global Accessibility

Awareness Day, so I was in China last year, and I was like why -- you know, what are we doing for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, up was at Microsoft, was a very big deal, and everybody was, oh, what is that? So we -- I worked with the University, I was a master's student, the most like prestigious University in China to do their first ever Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and we worked with brands like Lenovo, I could go into a whole talk, really interesting to understand what is the view of disability in China, how can brands like Microsoft that have a big business in China and really value disability and see it as a source of innovation, how can they bring those beliefs to China and help shift the challenges that people there face around kind of the historic stigmatization?

And then this last one, is a photo with me and Microsoft CEO, where I got to present when they were doing -- when they were rolling out PowerPoint, rolled out live captioning features, so I got to kind of show him that, and I thought it was -- I like this photo, because I think a lot of times companies bring in diverse talent, but don't always give them the opportunities to shine and actually promote them and raise them up, and this was a really meaning -- I mean, it took him like five minutes, but for me, you know, still one of my favorite moments in my career, so I think that is another important lesson is always, you know, don't just worry about recruiting talent, but think about bringing in talent, and then how do you give them opportunities too.

So this is more of kind of a practical side, but I want to talk about some case studies where we've seen brands really lean in to disability and accessibility inclusion. This is one -- I love this story of Nike, because the Nike is a brand that I think, you know, even if you ask them, did not always have it right. Originally, I think Nike is also interesting, because when you think about sports, sports historically is something that hasn't been accessible for people with disability, there's instances, like the special and paralympics, I've never felt like I could walk on to a soccer team and get picked, and Nike has this mantra, if you have a body, you're an athlete, which I think is interesting, really pushing into this idea that everyone who has, everyone is an athlete, in some way, shape or form.

In 2018, I grabbed this tweet, and it's ironic that I keep grabbing tweets to story-tell, given everything that has happened with Twitter's accessibility team, if you haven't heard, they're all gone. This tweet athletes with disability shared mixed feelings after Nike signs runner with cerebral palsy. So there's this really interesting piece, it wasn't actually like an official Nike video, but one of those kind of click baity Facebook content creation, almost call them like factories, a lot of their videos are so generic, but they put to the this clip of Justin who is a runner at University of Oregon, who had cerebral palsy, and very kind of inspirational video of him running, and it felt a little bit like inspiration porn, so I think we're familiar with that term, but basically this idea that people with disabilities are not here to inspire you.

We shouldn't be celebrated for just living our lives, for doing things that everyone else can do, so this -- this clip very much felt like that, though, people were saying, well, is every Nike athlete who is getting signed having this whole like mantra created about them? And I think what was -- what I really liked is how Nike handled the situation, so one, they said, you know, this wasn't actually our official collateral, but let's work with the disability community, and Justin, the athlete, to create actually a video that, you know, both him and Nike as the brand can feel proud of.

But then kind of going further, if you lean forward a few years, you will see they started coming out with the fly-ease, if you're not familiar with that, I have a picture, it's a shoe, instead of in this instance, instead of shoelaces, there's zippers, you can zipper closed, for people with dexterity issues or mobility issues, it's interesting, because they approached the marketing of this very differly, the first video that I saw, this product was actually inspired by someone with a disability, I want to say it might be cerebral palsy, I'm biased, I'm not going to say that, but he wrote to Nike and he said I love your shoes but I can't wear them, because shoelaces and some other factors, so they went and created an adaptive shoe for him, but then when they came out with the marketing for that, they

-- the video very much featured him kind of as a co-designer, which I thought was really interesting. One kind of mistake that we often see brands doing is when they talk about disability, they don't actually have the person with the disability speaking, like the parents, I am so proud of this person for waking up in the morning and all of that, but Nike really shined a lot on just -- not Justin, but on the designer of the person with the disability who wrote and kind of had the idea for this shoe.

And then they also worked with athletes with disabilities to kind of show how that could be helpful for them, and then on top of that, they've started to integrate disability a little bit more into their regular marketing, too, so this is just an example that I found on the Nike Web page below, and it's -- I think a teenager who is in a wheelchair and she's kind of dressed head to toe in Nike raising her hands, and that is important, too, you know, you want to normalize this idea that people with disabilities are part of our society, so, yes, it's great that we future them and we do things like this adaptive shoe or the Xbox adaptive controller, but I also want to see them as part of the regular rhythm of casting some really interesting work that's been done in the past is Verizon,

media, and getty, it's now oath, I think they rebranded, but they did a collection where they actually worked on people with disabilities to be represented in stock photography, because stock photography, it's very undervalued, but when you think about it, especially when you're in marketing, you're going and searching image, and you're putting them on these posters and in textbooks and they're showing up everywhere, stock photography, if you don't have any people with disabilities, we're kind of erasing them from all of these different elements of society which becomes very important, and again, how do we view disability?

What are the stigmas surrounding people with disabilities and how do we change that? So that's an example where -- I like it where I think they got it wrong at the beginning, you can see they've corrected, they actually have a fun story about the fly-ease, they had some more trouble with the disability community a little while ago, because the fly-ease sneaker heads really loved the adaptive shoe, and they were selling out of the shoe before anyone with disabilities could buy it, so that was interesting, and I mean I think one of my friends now works on accessibility at Nike, and she -- and it was interesting because it's like one of those things where originally, when you order, a lot of these brands like Target has accessibility adaptive clothing, but they order them in very -- in

comparison to their other products very small quantities, because they expect it to be very specialized, so this was an interesting example of it going very mainstream and not being prepared for it, but now, I think when they order, they're ordering a much higher quantity of sneakers and now, if you go on Nike, they have a whole collection of fly-ease. One tip that I would going to give to Nike is I don't think you can go into the retail stores and find these shoes.

I would love to see their flag ship stores that are all over New York carry that shoe too and not have where you have to mail order it. This was I think my favorite example of a -- after a successful marketing campaign. This was Netflix release Crip Camp, which is basically really a film that highlights this camp that is for people with disabilities, but it really became this breeding ground of disability advocates, like Judy Heumann is featured, I think it was significant for Netflix, because it was one of the first major films that they put out on their platform that really focused exclusively on disability, and I -- what I loved what they did, which I thought was so cool and innovative, they partnered with Andraéa LaVant who has this consulting service called LaVant Consulting,

and basically I've worked with them at Microsoft, what they do is they are a BIPOC women-owned group of disabled women, they work with brands think about how do you engage the disability community? How do you bring authentic representation? How do you make your events accessible? So this was kind of their first big project, and here I will describe the slides, but we have basically what it is is on the lower quadrant, the lower left quadrant, we have a poster that says Crip Camp online training, May 17 through August 30th, throughout that period each week they had events and it was all conducted over Zoom where they would engage the disability community in various topics like grassroots advocacy, how to kind of like get PR, like pitch an article to a publication.

So different topics like that, and Obama's production company was the producer of Crip Camp, so for one of the events, and this is Obama and Andrea, Obama is on the left, and Andrea is on the right, and he came to one of the Zoom calls, and it was super cool just to see that, and below is Andrea's team, what I really loved about this example, is one Netflix included people with disabilities from the start and really gave them the ability to lead there, and they -- I think they intentionally reflected a company that was very diverse and represented a spectrum of the disability experience, because it's very easy to focus on one disability or one race when you're thinking about disability, but it's important to understand when you think about diversity, equity, inclusion,

any other space, we also have to think about it within disability, so they did that successfully. I really like that they made sure the event was accessible from the get-go, so all of the events that they did on Zoom, they had live captioning, they had a sign language interpreter, places to request accommodations, and it was interesting because even though it was all sponsored and they were hired by Netflix, you really got to develop a relationship with other advocates within the disability community, so that's how I actually met Andrea was through just attending this campaign and seeing what an amazing job she did with that.

So that I thought was a really great example, and probably my favorite one of how brands have brought in disability and people with disabilities and accessibility. And then I think there's also this piece on product truth, though, and I'm working a little bit backwards, but in order to have accessible marketing, accessible -- an accessible brand, you have to have product truth so your products have to be accessible, and again, that's kind of the most important piece for me.

It's not always where I jump to, because I'm very marketed kind of brained, but it's important -- this is a screen grab from Target's adaptive lines. They have like a woman's jacket. I think is -- I'm not going to be great at describing these articles of clothing, but I think this is almost like a onesy with a T-shirt on top, and there's like snaps, and then the next one is a Sweatter, and it also I think has the bottom like a snap-in type piece, so really they all have physical modifications to make it easier for people with disabilities to get dressed.

I wonder, you know, how sustainable is this, because, again, the audience is limited, so with Target, you can't walk into your Target and get these pieces. Have you to order them online. The line is rather limited. There's maybe, when I checked, 20 pieces, but I'm pretty sure we all have more than 20 articles of clothing, so how do you kind of move -- how do you have a big enough line, and then the like little secret, they're not really super profitable, because to make it at a price point that is in line with Target, they're not getting the volume that they would normally be able to achieve to get those price points, a lot of these items, and I don't know about Target's situation, a lot of this, and Tommy Hilfiger has a line, adaptive collection, that are sold at a loss.

In the future I want to think about and how do we -- how do we -- how do we start to bring things forward and make them a little bit more sustainable, where it's not just, you know, a nice thing to do, but it's actually good business practice to do that. I was even thinking about -- so I went to uniglow the other day, I was looking at jeans there, and for the first time ever, I saw where you select your waist size, and then every jean is a size 34 length, and they give you the option to alter it for free, and it made me think about, like this adaptive fashion kind of idea, what if instead of having specific pieces with certain snap ons, we gave people the ability to customize, whether uniglo is

doing, having to produce Agean in every length, they're just cutting it to order, and that was a really interesting concept to me, I was looking into this, I saw that Microsoft is actually moving in this direction a little bit, so they just came out with a bunch of adaptive accessory, they partnered with this brand or company called shape ways, which actually prints the accessories on demand for you, so you can get like little -- like modifiers for computer that will snap on, and change and there's a picture of that.

And but it's all printed on demand, and, you know, I really want to look into like what is the economics behind this, too, and is that something that is going to be more sustainable versus this idea of just kind of continuously making new products which can feel very splashy, but at the end of the day, if they're not available in any of the stores, and they're not being -- and they're not -- you know, they're being produced in very limited quantity, how long will these brands sustain it for, executive lose interest, and then the sponsorship for that is gone.

And then I think I described this, but on the left we have uniglo's product page, and you can see, and it's a little bit blurry here, but there is a box to actually select your length, and what style of cut off you want, which I thought was really cool. This might be more of why you all actually came here, but I wanted to kind of put together, just make sure that people are like leaving with something specific, I wanted to put together some simple tips that I think about for driving accessibility forward and marketing.

You know, one of the first things I think is ask your teams, your coms teams, your marketing teams, what are you doing to make your work accessible? I bet if you're not an accessibility focused organization, they may be lost and stare at you, just asking that is a great way to start the conversation. And then there are a bunch of resources online, and I'll work with Thomas to put that -- a list together, and you can send them out, but lists -- there's a -- like Google for example, put together, you just Google accessible marketing, they actually have a whole toolkit that they put together for kind of marketing and coms teams around things like how to make your events accessible, how to make your social media accessible, so a lot of great resources,

but I think the first step is to ask if you're not the person doing that. Another great tool that I like is using the accessibility checker, so both Google suite and Office have an accessibility checker. They've located it right next to kind of spell check, and it's really nice reminder to add things like ALT text to your captions -- I mean to your pictures, so when you have a picture on a slide, are you adding text that is actually describing what is on that picture?

You kind of saw -- I hope I did a good enough job, but you saw when I had all of these pictures on the slides, I was trying to describe them when I went through them, in case anybody was blind oh low vision and wasn't seeing that slide. Adding ALT text, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all have great features to add ALT text to your social media work without extorting the kind of creative behind the work.

I think that is a big barrier is a lot of people who work in advertising and marketing are kind of snobby about their work, and are like, oh, if you add the ALT text here, it's going to ruin the aesthetic, or they might have text that is not on a high enough contrast background, but it's the brand colors, so, you know, trying to I think, one, explain why things like having high contrast text against a background is important, but then also -- also showing them that places like Facebook and Instagram have already built in these features that make it really easy for you to add ALT text is important.

And with TikTok, and a lot of Instagram shorts now, you can add in the captioning too, and the captioning is an interesting one. I mean, usually it's AI captioning, which isn't great, because we know that AI isn't as great as a human captioner, like we have here. But -- but AI captioning is a good place I think to start, and what they can do, then, is use the AI captioning and then watch it over, and make sure that it's actually correct and captioned.

And they should actually be captioning even if they're not thinking about accessibility, because it's actually become a best practice within social media since so many of us watch these reels or videos on mute anyway, you will see a lot of influencers who are not doing it for accessibility adding captioning in. And then I think, you know, using stock photography that highlights the diversity of disabilities, so Disability:IN for example, has an open source stock photography library for people with disabilities.

Getty has a disability collection within their -- I think Getty charges for it, but trying to make sure that you have disability represented as part of the human experience and you're trying to capture all of these different people in your stock photography. Hiring people with disabilities to consult and work with you. I think this is probably the most important thing, actually, is like I really love that I get to be as -- in a room sometimes, and an executive may not agree with me, but I can say from my experience as a person with a disability, this is what I believe, and there's nothing I can really say to that, because if we're talking about accessibility, they don't know what's going on, and I think it's important, though, to have people who

have those lived experiences to be a part of the conversation, and again, we know that people with disabilities face higher rates of unemployment or underemployment, so why not give them an opportunity to bring something to your organization? And then ask your agencies to hire people with disabilities. If you're not in the marketing or kind of creative or coms world, a lot of agent -- a lot of brands don't actually do their own work or have it in-house, it's usually all outsourced to agencies, and a lot of agencies are relatively small, so they may, one, not know about some of the things they talked about, but they also might not have people with disabilities on their agency side, so if you're asking for work that features people with disabilities, or is accessible, you should be saying I want someone.

How do you plan to bring in people with disabilities to review this work or to look this over? This is at least -- you can't really say hire them, but you can say how are you going to bring them into this process, I think is important. And when you do bring them in, pay them. I think it's, you know, a lot of times I'm shocked to see brands want to bring in people with disabilities, also people from all marginalized backgrounds and not pay them for their work, or do things like, oh, I'll give you a $20 gift card for this, and especially a lot of people who are doing this professionally, this is how they earn their income, so be respectful of that and make sure that you're actually paying a fair wage for their work.

And then finally, make sure that you're advocating for disability to be part of your diversity, equity and inclusion work. I remember when I was applying for jobs, again not that long ago, I've -- college was amazing to me to be able to look through different diversity statements of companies and see that a disability was not represented or even talked about or addressed in that space, and that is still something that is very common.

So I think, you know, when you're all having these conversations or being brought into meetings and you're not seeing disability represented, say something, or say, hey, why -- why are we not talking about this? Or what are we doing to bring in this perspective? Awesome. So I think that is pretty much my presentation, what I have -- had to talk about, but I wanted to open up the floor and see if there are any Q&As?

I think we have some in the room.

PARTICIPANT: Thanks for the great presentation. I really loved your example about where Nike failed and then they went and tried again and they were successful. I find that more than not companies are even scared to fail when it comes to disability, so could you sort of provide some just -- I don't know, just ideas of a -- how to motivate a company to feel safe and why it's important to pursue it even if you are first going to fail?

Yeah.

BRYAN STROMER: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And my answer to that would be I think is provide guardrails. So I know one thing that we did at Microsoft which is really helpful is our group, which was -- our disability marketing group, which was mainly comprised of people with disabilities, we would offer to review work before it went out and before it became, you know, had the opportunity to become a big mess if it was perceived wrong, so that was an example of a guardrail where we said, you know, it's okay if you get it wrong in this space, or on this meeting, because none of us are going to go screen shot this and share this out.

But -- but it's important to do this work, so we're willing to provide the feedback on that. So I think one is providing guardrails. I mean, I think I always struggle, the disability community, rightfully so, can be very critical sometimes when things go wrong, and I mean what I always look for as a person with a disability, I mean even people say things to me that I'm sometimes like how do you feel okay saying this?

But I look and I say, think about, you know, what is the intention here? So I really value -- even if they get it wrong, I really value that at least someone is thinking about disability in this conversation, I'd rather they get it wrong and at least trying to think about disability versus not address it at all. But I haven't gotten a huge -- I don't have a perfect answer. I know back, I know you're friends, is there anything that you did at Snapchat --

PARTICIPANT: Oh, you know me, hi.

BRIAN: The accessibility space is very small.

PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I was going to come say hi, do the formal introduction. I work at Snapchat, I got your e-mail from Judy, five minutes later, they did lay off, so looking if anybody knows a team. That being said, one of the things we focused on was the wheelchair emojis, for those of you familiar with the Bitmojis, the cartoon character of Snapchat, and so it's actually designed after my wheelchair, I cannot take the credit, because I worked with entire team of designers, and it was months and months in the process, critiquing, saying you failed here, you're wrong here, this is right, this is wrong, and that process is really something that is, umm, so integral to branding disabilities is -- is making, to your point, I would rather them see both us and other individuals invited to the table for these discussions and fail

versus not be on the discussion at all. And I think that when you -- when you do that, and even those of us who are professionals in the space, are willing to put our reputations out there, saying, hey, we've been working with, we'll continue to work with them, is a really great way to help support organizations feel safe and increase that work, but also be a bridge and a conduit to the disabled community.

So umm, truly, like I think that, you know, I've tried many times to get more things done, but companies are often scared so that's -- it's a journey.

THOMAS LOGAN: I'm going to take a question from YouTube. Observation, most disabilities are nonapparent. I've mostly seen people with apparent disabilities depicted in campaigns with visuals. How would you recommend people with nonapparent disabilities be represented and included in media and visual marketing?

BRYAN STROMER: Ooh, that's a great question. I think even these involve the wheelchair is often the symbol of disability, so we see that be something that is really kind of used as representation. I think that, you know, in terms of nonapparent disabilities, I've seen some interesting work done where I've seen -- maybe on the person's screen you will see some sort of like focus software, I've seen that done in Microsoft. I really like the use of text like overlay, like over the pictures, so again, these disabilities are nonapparent, so you're not going to get it from just glancing at the photo, so I like sometimes they will have like a text kind of thought bubble where the person may talk about how their nonapparent disability is affecting them, and then have that over the photography which I think that's an interesting approach.

I mean, it's also interesting because I've even thought about this, I've been in stock photography around disability, and the funny thing with me is when I'm sitting down or really standing up, you can't even tell that I have a disability, so -- but, and I've thought about should I be in these photographs that they want people with disabilities, but I also think that that's part of disability, it's not always going to be in your face, like, oh this person has a disability, so I think sometimes even with the nonapparent disabilities, it's fine if it's not clear that they have that.

But I think, you know, if you're authentically casting someone who has a nonapparent disability, then that -- I see that as progress still, and then I think if you really need to show that they have a nonapparent disability, there are those other techniques like the text overlay, or you can think about their screen, or even like how they're positioning their desk, or I've seen really interesting work for people who are low vision, which you may not be able to tell, if you have, they will show their screen being super Zoomed in, which interesting so that work I really like.

PARTICIPANT: Hi, I work at a University, and when the topic of accessibility is talked about, it's usually to prevent litigation. How can I actively encourage them to do more?

BRYAN STROMER: I love your question, because when I go back to the vendor example, it's funny, my slide, the new center they named was the student access center. The old center was called disability -- equal opportunity Affirmative Action and disability services, and it was run by the University's legal team, and -- so I think it's very much still a thing, especially in higher ed settings where it is -- disability is about compliance, and avoiding lawsuits, and -- and I think the way that I've seen it talked about, and I've been lucky to work a very innovative companies, but talked about I think is powerful in the corporate space a lot of times is disability is a source of innovation, so thinking about how creating experiences that are accessible are just creating better experiences.

So for example, an example I love to give is when I'm on a plane, I get really annoyed when some of the movies don't have captioning, because -- it's not that I need the captioning, but it is so loud on a plane that I don't want to have my headphones on full volume, I don't need to develop another disability, and so it's nice to have the captioning, and that's an example where that tool was built for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but everyone benefits from that.

There was a recent study where it said 70% of people who are using captioning now don't need it, it's a very millennial Gen Z thing. I would lean away from all of the compliance and legal things and start to show a little bit more of the innovation side, this is controversial, but you will see a lot of people, advocating start to lean into like this idea of inclusive design, or kind of those which I think are a little bit sexier sometimes than accessibility, accessibility and compliance, so I think trying to tell the full story, where compliance and accessibility still play an important role in all of the laws are so important, but also what work are we doing to talk about inclusive design, and what work are we doing to talk about disability culture in framing, again,

disability as part of the diversity, equity and inclusion conversation, where it's like, hey, we have leaders in this space, what are we doing to study and include that in our curriculum, too? So I think my approach for that has always been trying to bring in all of the other elements of the disability experience, so that, yes, compliance will always be a part of it, but it's not the only conversation.

PARTICIPANT: I've worked a couple of places and I agree with it being from an administrative perspective a liability issue, but at the same time, professors have a lot of control over the classroom. I think if you targeted the professors, they'll do it. They can do it, too. And that could be a very interesting...

THOMAS LOGAN: So we'll take a question here from online. How may I start a conversation about accessibility and marketing and physical accessibility?

BRYAN STROMER: So that's an interesting question. So I understand, I'm hearing it as how do I start a conversation about accessibility and marketing and physical accessibility? I mean, I think that would depend, for physical accessibility, on like what line of business are you in, so if you're a Target, Target corporation, physical accessibility is going to be super important thinking about the accessibility of your stores, your fulfillment center, all of that, and that really I think is going to be -- and that kind of goes into product truth, because in a lot of ways Target, their product, is their stores and the manifestation of that.

Versus if it's like a place of employment, I mean, that's harder, because that gets into more of like the HR side of accessibility, and what are we doing from an accommodations standpoint? Is our physical space accessible, meaning, you know, are there stairs? Is it barrier-free? So I think really what I would try to do is understand what the specific business you're in, is there product truth to kind of is having that physical space be accessible?

If the answer is yes, I would definitely connect it to that, so your marketing should talk about, if you're Target, how your stores are accessible, what you're doing to make those spaces accessible. If the physical space isn't as customer-facing, it's still super important because again I believe the best way to become accessible is by hiring more people with disabilities, and you're not going to have people with disabilities working at your company or your space, if your space isn't accessible, but it might be a little bit more challenging to connect it to the actual marketing element.

THOMAS LOGAN: We have some more questions for you, Bryan, that we'll share with you in e-mail, and I think you have your contact slide on the last slide to reach out to you?

BRYAN STROMER: Yes, my e-mail is just [email protected] .

THOMAS LOGAN: Thank you, again, Bryan, so much.

BRYAN STROMER: Thank you.